Flicker

"Flicker is a memoir in verse of a life well lived. Lynn Hansen rightly names the collection for her favorite bird, and for the flickers, or moments, of happenings caught in words, illustrating phases and interests of a lifetime. She carries us through childhood’s joys of “forest humus, thick moss / and a bouquet of wild orchids” and woes, “the word move was profane because it frees the rat of anxiety that gnaws on the tight knot in my gut.” She rejoices when she declares, “When I retire I’m going to write poetry.” Then for a decade or more, that’s precisely what she has done. Lynn was determined to be a scientist in a time it was regarded as impossible for women; her thirty-three-year career of teaching biological sciences at the college level has proven her right. Her keen naturalist’s eye, her awareness and love of all life on this planet, and beyond, show in her poems. She even celebrates the lowly zucchini and rutabaga, though she does sigh toward the end of summer, “Zucchini manna again?” These observations are woven into the sum of time, the treasure of relationships, “just as our lives gathered out of jumble, then cemented with a matrix of mutual respect.” Lynn’s lone robin “lifts his bugle beak to call up morning,” and so lifts us all." —Patricia Wellingham-Jones, Los Molinos, California "This collection by Lynn M. Hansen is an excellent read. While each poem is intensely personal, moving from childhood experiences to motherhood to traveling the world to growing older, Hansen generously takes us along on all her journeys, creating poems that welcome all comers. Her close observations of the natural world, of lands both distant and close to home, create a landscape at once scientifically clear and poetically imagined, and her poems about growing up and getting older and the joys and losses that come with those parts of our lives, will make readers laugh and cry, sometimes all at once. In reading this book, I grew to even more deeply appreciate our world, our Great Central Valley, and Lynn Hansen's poetry, and I suspect the same will be true for all who read this celebratory work." —Gillian Wegener, Poet Laureate of Modesto, California. "Lynn Hansen's gorgeous book of poems is a testament to a writer who loves life and fully embraces living every day. It's rare that a trained scientist will turn to poetry to reflect on the natural world and even rarer that those written poems would be this wonderfully lucid, evocative, and heartfelt. Filled with keen-eyed wonder and amusement, these poems will teach readers about life and how to live." —Sam Pierstorff, Editor, Quercus Review Press